It is known in the agronomic, horticultural and forestry crop raising industries, such as in tobacco farming, that the overall crop yield can be increased by removing axillary and terminal buds that would otherwise take away nutrients that can be directed toward another section of the plant. In tobacco farming, the leaves of the plant will grow larger more quickly if the axillary and terminal buds are removed.
One easy and yet time consuming and expensive method of removing axillary and terminal buds is to have a worker pinch, cut or otherwise remove the buds by hand. Because of the time and costs involved, chemical debudding agents have been developed.
As will be appreciated by one skilled in the art, it is necessary for a debudding agent to be active enough to sufficiently destroy or inhibit the growth of the buds, and yet it must not kill the plant itself, known as "necrosis", or impart hazardous phytotoxicity levels to the plant to make it unfit for human or animal use.
Fatty alcohols have been used as debudding agents. It is commercially known that 1-decanol is useful as a debudding agent because of its high activity in debudding and inhibiting bud growth and because it imparts low phytotoxicity to the plants themselves. One known preparation contains 1-decanol mixed with 1-octanol.
Fatty alcohols having higher than 10 carbon atoms have not been employed as debudding agents, because they are known to cause high necrosis and phytotoxicity in plants such as tobacco leaves. Those known compositions that do contain a fatty alcohol with more than 10 carbon atoms, have included these alcohols only as an unintentioned impurity imparted to the composition during manufacturing processes. These impurities are generally of about 3 percent by weight or less.
Even though the fatty alcohols having fewer than 10 carbon atoms showed the desired activity levels and the desired low levels of necrosis and phytotoxicity, these compounds are more toxic to humans and animals than the fatty alcohols having a larger number of carbon atoms.
For example, it is known that 2600 to 3100 milligrams per kilogram of 1-hexanol is considered lethal to fifty percent of a rabbit population (LD50), while the number is greater than 10,000 milligrams per kilogram for 1-dodecanol.
Furthermore, flammability hazards are greater with fatty alcohols having 10 or fewer carbon atoms than for those with a greater number of carbon atoms.
Therefore, debudding agents that have heretofore been commercially employed in the agronomic, horticultural and forestry industries have been those with fewer than 10 carbon atoms, because these alcohols cause less damage to the plants themselves. However, these alcohols with lower numbers of carbon atoms also present the most hazards because of their greater toxicity to humans and animals and the greater flammability hazards when compared to those fatty alcohols having greater than 10 carbon atoms.
Therefore, a need exists for a chemical debudding agent which has the high activity and low necrosis and phytotoxicity inducing levels of fatty alcohols having less than 10 carbon atoms, and the high stability and low human toxicity levels of the fatty alcohols having greater than 10 carbon atoms. No single alcohol or mixture of alcohols heretofore known, has possessed or been expected to possess these characteristics.